Nice spot, Work Programme. It won’t be CURRENT students on these marches – too busy with exams, essays in stuff 🙂 Besides, the changes won’t effect them PERSONALLY, that’s the way the Government always implement these sort of changes.

You wake up late for school, man, you don’t wanna go
You ask you mom, “Please?”, but she still says, “No”
You missed two classes and no homework
But your teacher preaches class like you’re some kind of jerk

You gotta fight for your right to party
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, “No way!”
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Man, living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

You gotta fight for your right to party
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, “No way!”
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Man, living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

Don’t step out of this house if that’s the clothes you’re gonna wear
I’ll kick you out of my home if you don’t cut that hair
Your mom busted in and said, “What’s that noise?”
Aw, mom you’re just jealous, it’s the Beastie Boys

You gotta fight for your right to party
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, “No way!”
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Man, living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

You gotta fight for your right to party
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, “No way!”
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Man, living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

Andy. The reason why the unemployed don’t do these protests is because students are united via Class, Uni etc. whereas unemployed people aren’t united and are individual in their acts.

The numbers make it powerful. We need a Central London protest of our own and local protests at each jobcentre. The problem is people sign on for their money, and if its not their day then its someone elses who wont join in solidarity to avoid losing their money.

There are:
* cuts everywhere
* MP expenses scandal (we all forgotten?)
* 20% VAT in January
* Universal Credit (Poll Tax 2)
* A new war? N Korea has ability for Nuclear Weapons (Even if of shit grade but its still nuclear) and we no longer have jets

that why we sign on at different times, days, fortnightly intervals, it’s to keep the unemployed as isolated as possible, don’t want them to start getting ideas. unemployed people need to grow a backbone, where is the solidarity, if they think there is a chance of a job or they might lose their money they stab each other in the bag. they won’t go on a demo cos they think the job centre or an employer might see them on the telly. they’re like punch drunk zombies on lithium. so sad to see.

Offered support to a claimant who feared the Sheriffs Officers (Baliffs) might arrive to illegally evict from his flat because the landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage. He’d been advised by the council that any eviction would be illegal – so I offered my help on that basis.

Attended ATOS Medical as an observer on behalf of a claimant who wanted someone to accompany him.

Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty http://edinburghagainstpoverty.org.uk/
is on my doorstep so it was easier for me to get involved in helping other claimants and protests. But if you want to get involved why not contact ECAP for advice about setting up a group where you live?

it is a right to demonstrate,however the students have not been the subject of constant derision (or would ever be) by duncan smith and the media trail behind focusing on the jobless unemployed.

the jobless in many ways have been the victim of conservative party division tactics’in society that are their hallmark,the miners,the unions,have all fallen foul of this basically anyone who does not adhere to conservative policies or thinking or would ever likely to vote for them are singled out for this adverse tactic, despite in many cases being justified with the end outcomes.

how many would choose coal to keep warm at lower prices over today’s gas monopoly and the vastly inflated prices to increase profits,coal is a commodity that should not be simply discarded because it was seen as unfashionable.

riots appear to follow the conservatives every time they are in power,the above photo is an interesting example,this compared with the brixton riots some three years earlier where the police were using a truncheon and a dustbin lid and were without riot equipment,before this it was unheard of previous to mrs thatchers time in office,more was to follow notably the famous poll tax riots of 1990 which was seen by many to contribute to her downfall.

despite talk of “were all in this together” this is not true as those on benefits have been hit the hardest,and have been the victim of the most attention in terms adverse publicity,someone could be forgiven for thinking that targeting a “benefit culture” then none of the current problems would ever exist and be banished forever,as even if the conservatives would dare be leave that was true.

I’m afraid I don’t detect any esprit de corps amongst the unemployed. University students are already members of a community, so organising demos is realtively easy. The only community the unemployed get is when they are forced to join a New Deal programme.

That is what makes this website so valuable; it’s the nearest thing many of us have to a community.

What I found strange was; it doesn’t really matter how crap your policies are, it is all about getting the publics confidence in you. Labour generally (pre-brown) did ok at this.

Dave seems to want to rub everyone up the wrong way. Constantly, always something to annoy people. If you are planning big cuts, stick something else out to try and balance it. David Laws isn’t the answer. (hint: MP expenses)

OK, he is trying to launch the happy index rating thingy (yeah it died so much, I don’t know what its officially called!) This annoys people as no one is happy. really. He is now trying to cut the sport finance for kids.

Who cares about the economic recession? I thought that was bad. This ConDem Government is bringing emotional depression everywhere!! Of course middle classes and higher and typically exempt from that.

He is feeling the strain so much that the 3 key places he is (Downing Street, Palace of Westminster and Conservative HQ) have had their security increased. The former 2 already have high security.

What’s the point in protesting like the students? By the time it’s organised the bastards know to expect it. We would just get “kettled”, arrested and beaten up by the rozzers, just like the students.

Far better to mount a guerrilla campaign. A few joke centres reduced to smoking ruins would be FAR more effective than risky and ineffective protests. And, importantly, no need to find the cash to travel to London, Birmingham, Manchester or wherever.

Sitting ducks, they will attack… but get it on film. Highlight the Met for who they really are.

Only way, they knew about moving towards Lib Dem HQ and stopped it happening.

Flash mob protesting is what is needed. Only problem is these are hard to organise whilst avoiding police finding out. Plus when promoting it in secret there will always be a grass or undercover person.

Also, with all due respect, the students had atleast 30 minutes notice to leave – but they stayed in solidarity to their cause because they were “allowed” to protest up until past 6pm – until police did a U-turn on that permission.

I think they had every right to remain but if they didnt want to be unlawfully detained they could have avoided it. All about taking risks.

I predict that these risky and ineffective “protests” won’t do any good; in fact they will strengthen the government’s position.
The LibDems will be demolished at the next election and the Con-servatives will be elected with an outright majority.

Yeah… too bad the military don’t get involved. It would be good for one of the to-be-soon scrapped jump jets to fly around London for a while, hover in front of Lib Dem HQ (sensible safe distance of course) and fire a few missiles…

The police motorcycles came out of nowhere and blocked the intersection of Kingsway and Theobald’s Road in central London. The bus came to a sudden stop and remained motionless.

What the heck? I walked forward to ask the driver what was going on and then I heard whistles and drums and indistinct chanting. I no longer needed to ask. The kids from the University of London were marching to protest tuition fee rises.

The driver let us off and I hurried to my meeting at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. By the time I came out, the University of London students had been joined by others from LSE and King’s College some bearing signs that read: “Tory Scum/Here we Come.”

Traffic was disrupted, the rest of normal life was not. A young man, not much older than the students, was busy handing out leaflets to join an expensive gym. The queues at the sandwich shops in the area were their usual length.

Where it all began

At the end of the day the marchers were kettled in by police in Whitehall, the street that runs through the heart of Britain’s government buildings. The Con-Dem coailition government’s policy of more than doubling tuition fees was still in place.

This was the second demonstration against the rise in tuition in the past three weeks and it was just as ineffective as the first.

Political marching, protest marching, call it what you will, has become in the new millennium a way of exercising one’s ego. When making a programme recently on the history of protest marching I asked folks over and over again why they went on marches?

“To make my voice heard,” was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn’t listening?

Making one’s voice heard wasn’t the reason people went on marches at the beginning.

The first successful political march in England took place in 1834. Six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset had been transported to Australia in chains. Their crime? Organisaing a society to prevent a cut in their wages.

For the Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, transportation to Australia was a sentence of living death and tens of thousands of workers marched from King’s Cross to Parliament to present a petition signed by 800,000 people demanding the six be allowed to return to Britain.

Parliament gave in to the pressure, and the men were allowed to come home.

Over the next century and a half, the political march became an important tool all over the world for those seeking political change and redress of injustice.

Marching did not always work and often ended in violence whether in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886 or outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburgin 1905.

But the rallies frequently produced pressure that led to dramatic change. Successful marching campaigns have certain things in common. They need to have a very specific goal and it should be focused on gaining a positive – independence, civil rights a decent wage – rather than repealing a negative.

All in the planning

Most importantly, the cause has to be one for which the marchers are willing to go to jail.

The next thing that is necessary is detailed tactical planning. The paradigm is the famous Salt March in India in 1930. The march was organised by Mahatma Gandhi to protest a tax on salt made in India. This tax meant it was cheaper for Indians to buy salt imported from Britain. How better to keep a colony tied to its ruler?

Gandhi spent months planning how to protest this tax. He decided to march from his ashram in Ahmedabad to the sea at Dandi, where he would make salt. The plan was to walk 10 miles a day for 24 days, along a route that went through Hindu and Muslim villages. This would demonstrate India’s unity and allow international press interest to build.

But the march was not open to just anyone. Anticipating the British authorities might use violence to turn him back, Gandhi trained 70 plus people in principles of non-violence and only they were allowed to march with him.

Hundreds of thousands turned out to watch along the way but only this handful of people actually walked the distance. There was no violence. The march did not accomplish its specific goal: the salt tax remained in place.

But it did something more important: it laid the foundation for a cohesive independence movement and it opened British eyes to the fact that India, the colossally complex jewel in its imperial crown, was a nation capable of speaking for itself and ruling itself.

Twenty-five years later, a young African-American preacher in the American south studied Gandhi’s tactics and used marching as the key tactic is the drive for “Civil Rights”.

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement staged the March on Washington to bring pressure on then President John F Kennedy for legislation guaranteeing African-American’s constitutional rights in the South, where segregation had disenfranchised them for more than eight decades.

Act of political nostalgia

Despite Kennedy Administration concerns about the potential for violence, the march went off without a hitch. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech which guaranteed that the march would become one of the most famous in history.

It also made marching the template for the full range of political protest associated with the 1960s. Martin Luther King would later march in Alabama from Selma to the state capitol Montgomery. The violence from local authorities that greeted the marchers led to an international outcry and hastened the passage of civil rights legislation in Washington DC.

Marches against the Vietnam War filled out the decade. Sometimes there was violence, as in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. But often the marches, with their hundreds of thousands of participants, went off without a hitch, their main purpose being to remind politicians of the war’s deep unpopularity.

It wasn’t just in the English speaking world that the 60s marked a high-water mark for political marching. French students marching through Paris in May 1968 provoked disproportionate violence from the government of Charles De Gaulle. This in turn cost the government its support in France at large, and the government fell.

Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change. Very few of those who walk the streets “making their voices heard” would be willing to go much further to change politics.

Marching is a right in free societies. Political leaders tolerate marching but don’t fear it. When more than a million and half people marched through London in February 2003 to protest the impending war with Iraq, it changed absolutely nothing.

In America, there have been million man and million women marches that echo Dr King’s March on Washington, but they seem to want nothing more than television camera time.

This has culminated in television personalities taking over the march on Washington business.

The two big rallies held this past election season were organised by TV stars Glenn Beck and John Stewart. I wonder what the future of political marching is. Clearly, it has become a fun day out and chance to be among like-minded people who wanted to make “their voices heard,” or “show politicians I disagree.”

Yes, well, thank you for sharing.

If protest marching is ever going to be a useful political tactic again, those who put one foot in front of another are going to have be willing to take a bit more risk.

Civil disobedience would be the next step, with jail time a possible consequence of one’s actions. How many students protesting tuition rises would risk that?

Tolpuddle was a much a story of the Anglican gentry oppressing Methodist workers as it was an economic protest. There was an element of religious persecution there as well.

Besides, when those Housing and Council Tax Benefit cuts make thousands homeless this time next year, there really WILL be something to get angry about. And getting arrested will at least mean warm food and shelter!

Civil disobedience is a good way to go. Could I suggest som further IDEAS ?

1 Every job seeker turn upto the job centre to use the job points. whether r not your supposed to. If they want you to leave then they have to ask you. You then complain
2 Visit the M.P’s fill up their surgeries and complain complain and complain
3 Spend an extra five minutes whining to the person you sign on with. they supposed to check what your doing. SSo play the game and tell them exactly what is going on you applyand apply and no employer sends you feedback.
4 Spend five minutes worth of pointless conversation with someone in authoritym your not being aggressive, or rude, your just asking stupid blooedy questions.

Everyone spends at least 5 minutes complaining to a job centre person then the less time they gott therefore yout tying things up